A Hint Will Keep You Wandering – Tom Hsu

In the exhibition, Tom Hsu explores the moment before an event, a foreshadowing of potential rupture. The photographs use revolving techniques of shrouding and revealing. The staging of the exhibition sets up a situation choreographed between access and inaccessibility, desire and forbearance. The selected photographs take a sideways, perambulating approach to desire. They approach it through the tact of wandering, without direct intention or purpose.

The whetstone in the kinetic sculpture was left behind by the artist’s grandfather, who visits Vancouver every winter during off-season in Taiwan. When he visits, he sharpens the knives in Hsu’s family’s restaurant. The knife is hung with a small motor that perpetuates its motion, drawing an arc across the space of the gallery, hitting the whetstone with each pass. The pendulum of the knife reiterates the mutual reliance and destruction of the dual aspects of veiling and unveiling, as it restricts access to the photograph behind it, and controls how viewers move around the space.

– Brynn McNab & Tom Hsu

Tom Hsu is a studio-based visual artist whose works seeks to investigate the absence of the human condition within empty spaces, as communicated through the photography of the everyday mundane. He currently lives and works in Vancouver, Canada and holds a BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. He is undertaking a residency at Burrard Arts Foundation from April to June. He has exhibited at Unit/Pitt, Index Gallery, and Sweetpup Studio.